Broadcasting LIVE from BummerWare Pte Ltd
its not”It’s Not the Big that Eat the Small…It’s the Fast that Eat the Slow”
its the loud eat the quiet
and the superficial matters that eat real value
my main litmus for selecting programming languages is ‘tool best fit for the job’
- within BW we use Flex, AJAX via Dojo, Groovy/Grails ( i hope soon jRoR).
this turns into a problem when people don’t project deep enough their overall needs and go for quick, early, visible gains and face pitfalls later
this is what i call dirty coding and that’s how inadequate languages (like PHP or VB) thrives on, easy for individuals to pick up, meet early needs, skip time-wasting steps like patterns, abstraction, reuse and domain design.
having said that, frameworks have a huge overhead to overcome
- the learning curve < what? i just want to copy-paste code scraps>
- cost and use of extensive toolsets < what? all i should need is a text editor>
- adhering to conventions, configurations < no. everyone else should adhere to my cowboy style>
People -being people- don’t see beyond visible benefits until they eventually have to and pay eventually a larger price - entrenched software
Sadly it’s not been much of a rollercoaster since open-sourcing Java, ultimately, Java got big on being strongly fronted by Sun, It had -anyway - always been an open development process , just short of having an OSS licence really…
Harsh reality for most OS projects, the community only gets as far as an interesting hobby and stops short of becoming a viable alternative for the everyday Joe.
Just take how many open source jobs (actual development,not jobs in companies that sell Linux CDs) out there and divide it by the number of contributors - that is a small fraction. I can only extrapolate that many of them to make their day-living developing on bad, proprietary platforms using closed languages.
This is why I feel that Ubuntu is probably the only true contender to Mac &Windows for the same reason, they have real strategy and a real business model.
Much as we try to deny, it sometimes takes a dedicated full-team well-funded team to take it down the final stretch.
it’s almost as though half-century of modern computing, enterprise IT had pretty much not changed since COBOL programs running on mainframes.
when software were basic single-purpose programs and hardware simple, it was probably much easier for business domain knowledge to match the effected software. as software development itself matured, it became increasingly difficult to match complex computing concepts to real, operational usage of software.
(popular joked: software development is the battle between people developing better software and the Universe churning out dumber users- so far,the Universe is leading)
Still, as a proponent of software development, we should try to bridge this distance, by meeting in the middle, rather than try to have IT consultants try to ram IT systems thinking (and expensive everyone-loses contracts) into business people disguised as clever acronyms and buzzwords.
IT needs to drop the ego, so do business users - ultimately what is the point of clever code appreciated only by geeky peers, software really only becomes a gem when it can be appraised by a foreign eye.
also, check out the interesting feature of PDFmeNot
Paul Graham an investor from Y!combinator recommends that start-ups really should just start and not be worried bout the poor economy and creditcrunch.
that the logic of avoiding this period is no less-twisted than a person with an over-inflated idea hoping that the good economy will guarantee success.
that’s encouraging - - after all, when times were good, it’s not like I get a lot of investors knocking. since I can do only equal or better
that’s a positive, right?
right…
ps:not that my favourite company Yahoo! is doing too great now they got a lot of laying off
pss: don’t sell to the Evil Empire, Jerry…